


Manifesto

by Curlscat



Category: The Sisters Grimm - Michael Buckley
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 14:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11899875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curlscat/pseuds/Curlscat
Summary: It always starts with once upon a time, but the way the story is told makes all the difference. Ficlet celebrating the series that made my childhood.





	Manifesto

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a birthday present for @delicatemirth on tumblr.

It starts like this:

Two girls lose their parents on a rainy night (it’s always in the rain) and have no one to depend on but each other for a year and a half. They are their only family, and the older one forgets how to trust people in learning how to survive.

The middle, though, the middle is complicated.

There’s a boy, and he’s rude and he smells bad, and an old woman (they meet her in the rain, too) who makes terrible meals but excellent desserts, and an old man who wears regret on his skinny shoulders like other people wear clothes. There are so many beautiful women, and one has spent seven hundred years telling herself how to be strong enough. All of the women have been loved by one man, and he is trying to be good enough for the one he could never get over. There’s a man with a broken nose who believes he is responsible for all the death that follows him, who brandishes flowers like weapons and uses magic as armor. There’s friends for the older girl, but all her favorites are traitors (a blonde girl, a boy who wants to grow up as bad as the older girl herself, a man as trapped as she is with whom she shares all her secrets). There’s a crazy girl who hurts because she doesn’t know better, and takes on other people’s hurts for herself.

There’s magic and danger and learning how to run. Sometimes there’s happy endings but mostly there’s thousands of people who’ve been shoved aside and forgotten, who have learned how to hate in the shadows. Sometimes there are people teaching themselves to love again. There are parents found and forgiven, and there are the families you make shoved right together with the families you’re born into (neither is more important than the other). There’s mistakes and forgiveness and learning to be better. There’s war, there’s birthdays, and there’s knowing how to love yourself; trust yourself; trust other people.

There’s a town full of people who just want to leave, and there’s the ones that stay behind when they can finally go. There’s the ones that leave for a while and then come back. There’s the ones that never come back.

It started with dark days and heartbreak and pouring your whole self into one other person, but this is how it ends:

Two girls build their own families, and learn how to balance what they want with what they need to be. They’re not happy all the time, but they’ve learned to make themselves happy with what they have. And when they lose things, they always fight to get them back.


End file.
